I tried multiple times to read through this book but it couldn't hold my interest. I DNF this book due to lack of interest.

Such a good book. Mysterious, atmospheric and definitely gave me a Du Maurier (whom I love) feel. Good writing, engaging characters and a great story! I loved it!

Atmospheric ghost story set in remote village on Scottish island haunted house with questionable history. Supernatural mystery with superstitious locals. Not sure about the eroticism, but considering the particular supernatural element, I guess it is reasonable.

"It begins, they say, with a woman screaming…

On a remote Scottish island, the McBride house stands guard over its secrets. A century ago, a young widow and her son died mysteriously there; just last year a local boy, visiting for a dare, disappeared without a trace."

-While You Sleep by Stephanie Merritt is a psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end! I love a good thriller/ghost story. Give it a read! I will definitely be checking out more from the author!

A Little Kinky and a Lot Scary

I liked this book. It was well-written and put an original spin on the accursed, haunted house story. In addition to her rock-solid grasp of the horror and psychological thriller genres, the author was insightful in her exploration of postpartum depression and grief, and the issues facing solitary women who must fight for survival and acceptance within a repressed, parochial society. It was a great book on so many levels.

I don't want to include spoilers in this review, so I won't discuss what I felt unsatisfied with in detail, but there were only a couple of things. One was concerning the brevity of description in the case of one character's death. It seemed as though that arc concluded with too little depth after the buildup that took place in the rest of the book. The entire final act seemed a bit too condensed, but perhaps I just didn't want the book to end.

Other than those minor quibbles, I really enjoyed this book!

I struggled to get through this book; putting it down and picking it back up three separate times over the last year.
The story was okay. I don’t want to give any spoilers, so I will only say that it wasn’t the plot elements, but the way the author chose to put them together. I needed something more to happen.

What I loved most about this was the remote, gothic, Scottish Isle setting. The setting itself was a character and set the entire mood of the story. Along with the setting, the representation of the island’s quirky characters added texture and life. An overall good book to curl up with next to the fire.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Stephanie Merritt and Pegasus Books for my complimentary e-copy ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Stephanie Merritt's While You Sleep is the excellent ghost story that I've been sorely lacking in my latest choices. The McBride house holds many secrets- people often vanish without a trace. It usually begins with a woman screaming. Zoe Adams sees the McBride house as a refuge from her failing marriage in America, but upon her arrival, she begins to feel like she's being watched, with unexplained nighttime noises, mysterious voices, and strange occurrences. Zoe knows that danger is near, but can she uncover the mysteries of the McBride house before it's too late.

I am not up to stories like these any more... I used to love scary, but it appears the older I get, the less I enjoy the scare. So, I skipped forward quite a bit here and there until I got to the relief at the end. I think younger adult, readers may enjoy this thriller/ ghost tale. I loved the setting, it's what drew me to the book! It's well written, and the characters are interesting. Good solid plot, too. I'd recommend it to patrons here at the branch.

This book is written beautifully and can be compared to the writing of Daphne DuMaurier's work. This book had it's creepy elements and although I wanted to know what happened, it was too focused on a sexual relationship with a ghost and that was just not something I was interested in reading about.

**3.5-stars rounded up**

Zoe Adams needs to get away. Recently separated from her husband, she rents a newly renovated home on a remote Scottish island. It doesn't take long after arriving at McBride house for her to discover that some places hold long memories.

Soon Zoe begins researching the history of the house and what she uncovers is far from comforting. Ailsa McBride, the original owner, was reportedly a witch who murdered her own child. In fact, just the previous year, another boy had disappeared from the grounds.

Constantly on edge, Zoe sleeps fitfully and begins having visions and visitations from the past. She can scarcely make it through a few hours at the property without something going awry.

Befriending a few men in the village, she begins to discover long-held island secrets and in turn, finds herself the hot topic for the island rumor mill.

The number of different leads and exposed secrets in this left me spinning. The lore of the island and overall atmosphere was excellently portrayed. I enjoyed the melding of past and present and the characters were well fleshed out.

At times, bordering on erotic, this was an unexpected twist of a classic ghost story with the incorporation of an incubus; something I had never read about previously and certainly was not expecting.

Although this was a slow burn, there was definitely enough intrigue to keep me turning the pages. The last 10% dropped my rating down a half star. I wasn't sold on the way the story ended. It seemed to wrap-up a little too neatly after the strong build-up.

Overall, I was impressed by Merritt's writing. If you are a reader that enjoys a bit of sexy times with your horror or mystery stories, you will definitely want to check this one out. Also, haunted house fans, this is worth a read. There were moments that I was absolutely freaked out while reading this.

Thank you so much to the publisher, Pegasus Books, for providing me with a copy of this to read and review. I always appreciate the opportunity!

I was overall impressed with this novel.

The writing was great and I really enjoyed the plot. My main issue with this novel was that I was hoping for a bit more background on the history of the place—that’s the only reason I knocked off a star. A bit more depth into that whole deal might have let me sink deeper into the novel.

All the rest, though? It was spot-on. Even though I called some of the twists and turns early on, the journey along the way was still suspenseful.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a copy to read in exchange for my honest review.

While You Sleep demands close attention to every detail because so many elements verge on the supernatural, the questionable, or the stark “you must be mistaken about that.” Zoe Adams has traveled alone from Connecticut, in October, to be the first tenant of the remote, newly-renovated McBride house. The house is five miles from a little town that is the entryway to a nameless Scottish island. It’s not especially picturesque: “the ferry terminus hardly warranted the name; there was a car park and one, low, pebble-dashed building, the word ‘Café’ flaking off a sign above the door.” She’s met at the ferry by her landlord, Mick Drummond, who insists that she come by his pub: he’ll not take no for an answer. It’s the last thing Zoe wants: she’s looking for anonymity, privacy, and a quiet place to paint.

But it had been naïve, she now realised, to imagine that a newcomer to a small community, out of season, would not immediately become a subject of gossip and speculation. If she was going to stay here a few weeks, it would be wise not to offend the locals on day one.

Zoe tells Mick that she has a family connection to Scotland and that she loved all the tales of “Selkies and giants and whatever” her grandmother used to tell. That makes Mick nervous.

‘As long as you know that’s all they are. Bit of fun. Tease the incomers.’ Mick smiled back, but he did not look reassured. ‘Come on then, you must be gasping for a drink.’

‘Tease the incomers,’ is it? Everyone Zoe meets alludes to strange tales about the house she’s renting. Edward, a young fiddle player/teacher and an elderly bookshop owner, ‘Professor’ Charles Joseph, seem particularly knowledgeable.

The prologue of While You Sleep is a blueprint of Zoe’s traumatic first 24 hours in the McBride house.

It begins, they say, with a woman screaming.



You can’t tell at first if it’s pleasure or pain, or that tricky place where the two meet; you’re almost embarrassed to hear it, but if you listen closer it comes to sound more like anguish, a lament torn from the heart: like an animal cry of loss, or defiance, or fury, carried across the cove from cliff to cliff on the salt wind.



If you stand on the beach with your back to the sea, they’ll tell you, looking up at the McBride house, you might catch, behind tall windows on the first floor, the fleetest shift of a shadow.

Zoe has erotic nighttime dreams/terrors/fantasies that find her waking up, aroused, not in the bed where she went to sleep. She’s on the cusp of pain and pleasure.

That night, Zoe dreamed.



She was stripped naked and laid across a low couch in the long gallery that ran the length of the house on the west side, facing the sea. Both arms were stretched above her head and pinioned so that she could not move them.



. . .



Despite the apparent helplessness of her position, she was not afraid; instead she felt an unfamiliar boldness, a pleasure and pride in her own body that made her want to arch her back, display her for him.

She wakes up, “feeling disorientated and raw,” actually “lying on a couch in the long gallery.” Zoe also senses she’s being watched (she thinks) by someone on the beach. She heads to town to get the murmurs about her rental house fleshed out. The locals tell her a stark tale: “A century ago, a young widow and her son died mysteriously there; just last year a local boy, visiting for a dare, disappeared without a trace.” The details paint a more complicated tale. Ailsa (née Drummond) McBride was a wealthy woman who lived alone after her husband drowned. She had a child out-of-wedlock, shockingly out-of-the-norm for the time. Legends grew up around Ailsa: it was said that, “the isolation drove her to madness.” But was she mentally ill or was it something different? Professor Charles proffers an alternative theory.

‘Silence and solitude have very particular effects on the brain. It’s more akin to the experience of religious mysticism. Or, conversely, what we might call being haunted.’



Zoe stared at him. ‘You’re saying – people might have thought Ailsa was crazy, and she maybe even believed she was being haunted, but really she was just suffering scientifically proven effects of isolation?’

Charles’s answer, ‘I’m offering up one explanation,’ is as dissatisfying for the reader as it is for Zoe. She presses Charles harder because “bad vibes” doesn’t even come close to describing her other-worldly experiences: is she being manipulated? Charles said to Zoe the first night they met that “everyone who comes here is running away from something.” Do she and Ailsa share that? What else do they have in common? Zoe asks Charles if “a place can retain memories of events?”

‘Absolutely.’ Charles put his cloth down and leaned against the sink. ‘You’ve heard of the genius loci, of course—the Roman belief in the particular spirit of a given place. The fact that it’s become a metaphor now doesn’t make it any less true.’

Zoe is an unreliable narrator, but then who isn’t? Everyone gives her a small piece of the puzzle, but the snippets are not necessarily accurate. It seems the town has a vested interested in her believing that the incidents she’s experiencing are only connected to the distant past. She thinks the events that are ratcheting up prove that someone(s) wants to stop her inquiries and questions. It’s time to reference Richard Pryor’s signature line, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” Zoe would add lying ears and nose to that prescient quip as she is repeatedly assaulted with things that just don’t add up.

Her mind is flooded with swirling questions and explanations: Has she been visited by an incubus? Is the McBride house situated on land that pre-dates Christianity? Every theory makes her wonder about the similarity of her experience and the woman who lived all alone in the house. Is Zoe being haunted or is she a little crazy: is the truth that “she should never have come here?” The title is a misnomer because you won’t be able to sleep until you’ve laid bare every mystery of While You Sleep.

No one who reads this site has any doubt that fantasy is my jam. Witches. Vampires. Demons. Ghosts. Fae. Dragons. I love it all. I also love a good thriller. So, While You Sleep should be a book I adored. After all, the entire premise is a haunted house and a mysterious death on a remote Scottish island. It all but screamed my name.Unfortunately, as so many things in life, While You Sleep is missing that "it" factor that allows a mediocre book to become unforgettable. Rather, it is one of those books I finished and promptly forgot until I reread the synopsis in preparation for writing this review. It is not any one thing that dooms the book either. Instead, it dies by a thousand papercuts - or the literary equivalent.For one thing, Ms. Merritt relies too heavily on the possibility of an unreliable narrator in Zoe. As we learn all the reasons why Zoe left the U.S., we must question her version of events, or so Ms. Merritt would have us believe. The thing is, I never bought into Zoe's unreliability, and so everything that occurs in the house never becomes anything but a ghostly mystery. Without the possibility of an unreliable narrator, enough crazy events happen to Zoe in her vacation house that should make While You Sleep a crazy ghost story, and it is. However, something happens along the way that is even a bit more than I was willing to accept. Ms. Merritt attempts to stay on that fine line of possibility versus probability by never actually introducing a ghost, something that drives me crazy in novels. It is a bit like having your cake and eating it too. If you are going to create a ghost story, then stand by that decision and stick with it. Do not create a ghost story and then never explain the ghost or try to pretend that it might all be in the narrator's mind but probably not. She provides very heavy hints as to what is happening to Zoe, but she never actually comes out and says it. Plus, even at the end, long after anyone is willing to believe in Zoe's unreliability, she still tries to convince readers that the entire story could still be a from Zoe's unstable mind. Just...no.I wanted to like While You Sleep. I wanted it to scare me in that delicious way a good ghost story can. Instead, I read a mildly entertaining story that tries too hard to put doubt into the reader's mind and loses its way. I finished it to get answers, even as those answers left me disgruntled and disappointed. There is promise within the pages though that would make me willing to try another one of Ms. Merritt's novels, although I would approach it cautiously just in case.

Amazingly well written book, the authors words kept me reading even more than the story itself! It was a great book and appreciate being able to read it in advance

Wowza - what a book! The mystery at the center of this book was so well strung together and I found myself looking for dark figures following me around at night. My only note about the book would be the frequency of very long passages of description, which comes down to my personal preference. Overall, an excellent book and worth the read!

I'm middle of the road with this one. While I didn't love it, I didn't dislike it. It was way too long, and slower than I would have liked with this story. But I'm aware this will be right up other readers's alleys.

I typically don't read horror but I wanted to branch out. I became interested in this book because it is set in Scotland, which is where my mother is from. I was not disappointed, this book fulfilled my expectations of a horror novel. It definitely have me the creeps! I was surprised by the erotic parts of the book because I hadn't expected them. That's not to say those parts were bad, in fact they were very vivid. I just wished that the summary of the book would have hinted at them. I enjoyed reading about Zoe and trying to guess the mystery that surrounded her life as well as the mystery of the house. I would recommend this book to both horror and mystery fans.

I am a huge fan of psychological thrillers, and this general story line was quite intriguing, but a raging sex ghost? I don't know. I'm not a fussy prim and proper kind of girl by any means, but I feel the description of this book should have given a little more away as to what to expect. Perhaps, fans of 50 shades will love While You Sleep. I actually went back and re-read the description and looked to see if my memory was incorrect that this was a Harper/Collins book and not a Harlequin.
Unfortunately the incubus took away from this book, and didn't leave me as satisfied as our dear protagonist.

Ok, so… I will go ahead and start with the things that I didn’t like and get them out of the way first.

The main character, Zoe, was… not very likeable at all. I understand she was going through an incredibly hard time, but she was just…ugh. She treated her husband pretty crappy. She made him out to be this horrible person. At the end of the book, she goes back to being with him, but it doesn’t really feel like she wants to be with him at all. She is also extremely selfish. Pretty much every action she has is selfish and it got extremely annoying. And then to make an already unlikable character even more unlikable, she was one of those sort of people who bit the head off of any guy who tried to be nice and help her. There were a lot of times when something like this happened:

*Man goes to open and hold the door for Zoe*

Zoe- “What is that supposed to mean!? Are you trying to say I can’t hold my own door open?? Women are just as capable as a man at holding doors open!! *angry face* ”

That wasn’t an actual scene, but stuff similar to it happened. A lot. Zoe had her tail in such a twist any time a guy did anything or said anything to her. I get that she felt marginalized by her husband, but that doesn’t mean she has to be such a huge jerk to every man on the planet. It just got so frustrating watching her act like that through basically the whole book. She never won me over and I didn’t really find myself caring about her at all.

The other thing that bugged me about this book was that there were several erotic scenes that were just a big “No thank you”. I understand that there was a sexual desire entity about/ in the house, but I don’t know… sometimes it just felt like too much unsatisfying sexual angst that was only a few steps away from rape. I seriously didn’t need to hear about Zoe’s swollen, sore, moist groin that much. In fact, I was pretty good never having to hear that from her at all. It wasn’t a heavily erotic book, but there was enough there that it was a turn off for me. I am not a fan of that sort of stuff at all, but if you like reading things along those lines, you might enjoy this book more then I did.

I did enjoy the premise. I didn’t really see it as much of a psychological thriller, but more of a modern gothic romance. Pretty interesting history attached to the house and I did have fun watching that part of the story unfold. You really had two mysteries to follow, the history of the original house owner, and that of a young boy who went missing the year before Zoe moved in. While the mystery about the missing boy was kind of predictable, it was still a fun mystery to follow to the end.

I did not like the very ending of the book. While most of the book left you unsure what was really going on, the very ending felt too predictable. You could guess a million miles away about Zoe’s secrets and what had happened to the lost boy. For most of the book, the writing was really well done, but the ending was just too convenient and tacked on feeling. And, as I said earlier, Zoe makes choices to go back to someone she seemed to really dislike, so it was pretty WTF. Like, you ran away to escape and caused all this drama, and then you just go back home like nothing happened?? What was the point then? What did she learn? How did any of this help her? :/

I know it sounds like I must have hated While You Sleep, but I didn’t. But I didn’t love it either. It had a nice gothic element too it and some interesting lore. I just wished the main character was more likeable and that the erotic sexy time angst was dialed back a little. That, and with a slightly different ending, this could have been a really good book instead of just an ok book.